USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 19
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Arthur came east to visit, was lonesome, and got ac- quainted with his older relative Kate. And now we see these two youthful dynamos in a buggy searching for a farm in the Tamworth area. They pitched upon the Lowell Brown place (originally Caleb Brown's), six hundred and fifty acres of meadows, forests, and brooks, including Wonalancet Falls, in Birch Intervale, 1,150 feet above sea level. The house which became Wonalancet Farm had the whole lovely intervale spread out before it, the river coursing through it, the woods coming down to the back door, and "blue upheavals" standing guard on three horizons. It was even then old (1814) of the low red story-and-a-half type, afterward extended by the Wal- dens and raised another story. Kate said she would buy it if Arthur would stay and manage it for her. When she had brought her family's old silver and china to it, her Boston connection came up swarming to view the phenomenon. They became her summer boarders over some fifty years, while the Farm acquired its renown and entertained its clientele of the distinguished, the witty, the charming and the wise, not to say the well known.
It was one of many old farms that then flanked the roads of Birch Intervale, a community under the mountains at the spot on the map where the towns of Tamworth, Sandwich, Albany, and Waterville met. Elbridge Tilton, by 1912 the oldest inhabitant, whose Golden Wedding was celebrated by our all walking across the crust to his house, properly bearing gold thimble and gold-headed cane, entertained that evening with a directory of the former families, something in this wise: "Well, the next farm to that one was Sylvanus Smith's. His wife was Hester [names improvised]; their children were Samanthy, Asy, Jeremiah, Matildy, Susan, Ananias, Abigail, Mercy, James, and Obed. Next to them was Joshua Higgins'. His wife was Prudence. They had Caroline, and Mehitable, and Timothy and Erastus and Noah and Benjamin and
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Japheth and Samuel and Lydia. Next came -. " The recital was long. The stove had been plied with fuel and the room was small, but Elbridge in his trance abridged no syllable, whether his audience was awake or not.
Elbridge would prophesy every fall the nature of the win- ter to follow, according to the "melt of the hawg" when slaughtered. Once asked by a newcomer, then building near by, if she could buy sand out of his sand pit, he said yes, she could. When she brightly pursued, "Then I'll send over to- morrow," he shifted his chaw and spat, and finally came out with "They buried a hoss in there last month." Elbridge's say- ings could hold us long. He was fond of jokes. He shot two black rats and nailed the skins up on his barn. Then he wrote the game warden that there were skins of two fur-bearing "animiles" nailed up on his barn that had been shot out of season. The game warden came fast.
After whole families of these farmers had gone west or to the cities following the Civil War, the old order had so changed that Wonalancet was a sparsely populated corner derisively named Poverty Flats, down in Tamworth where summer boarders were already giving tone. Any abandoned farmhouse on Poverty Flats which had formerly housed its ten or twelve children, however, if it hadn't burned, became, after Kate Sleeper, a summer home.
There are few written accounts as to the very earliest settlers. Doughty workers dealing with the elementals did not have the writing habit. Only Bradbury Jewell left a diary from which fortunately we have a few excerpts, preserved by a direct descendant, Lena Smith Ford of Sandwich. As Brad- bury was the local aristocrat of the early period, his entries have romantic as well as factual interest. In leather breeches and brass buttons he was elected first selectman among the stumps at first town meeting. The house he had built on Stevenson Hill with English bricks and pen-knife carving he swapped in a few years with Thomas Stevenson for Steven- son's farm in Durham, whence they both had come.
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For years Bradbury thus went back and forth to Dur- ham, living in two places. He was evidently a natural leader, had means and much intelligence. In all documents there is an "Esquire" or "Gentleman" after his name. When the Revolutionary War came up, Governor Langdon appointed him Captain of New Hampshire Militia, and as such he saw service. As he stayed active in Durham civic and church affairs, the same governor made him justice of the peace. The two were friends and business associates; Langdon with a shipbuilding business which Jewell supplied with lumber from his Birch Intervale holdings.
Birch Intervale, once discovered and acquired, governed his imagination, and he was determined to have his home there. What between lumbering, and clearing and planting for his prospective house, his commuting was considerable for those days, kept up even after he had moved from Durham for good. The trip took several days, and he appears to have com- monly taken along for company not his young and beautiful second wife Ann Elizabeth who had the children at home to look after, but his mother-in-law Betsy Edgerly who lived on her brother Noah Wedgewood's place just beyond, later the Sanford Gilman (Winkley) house. "Betsy and I went to Durham" is the frequent entry in his diary.
Bradbury's first wife had been Ruhamah Jewell of Sand- wich (Ruhamah was a quite frequent name in these parts, commonly reduced to Ruhy). She contributed a few small tombstones to the burying ground, "died of throat infection" (diphtheria, likely), and then followed them herself. But Ann Elizabeth in due time produced at least six or seven more children: Nathaniel who died at thirty-one, Mark Freeman, through whom the house descended, another Ruhamah, Brad- bury Jr., and other daughters, Sally, Eliza, and Lydia. "We, Bradbury Jewell and wife [Ruhamah] and John Tasker [indentured servant] came from Durham to Burton and Sand- wich to live [Tamworth, at this corner of Wonalancet, spills over into the three other towns Albany, Sandwich, and Water-
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ville as mentioned] the first day of August 1802, I being fifty years old." He writes as if for posterity, conscious of his im- portance in creating a line and a habitation of men. The family moved in first with brother John Jewell who had al- ready built and now put a sawmill on the stream by the house. The older Mark apparently had a house too. The next spring: "We finished boarding our house and these were fine boards we had from Ensign Henry Weed" (Weed's Mills in North Sandwich). "Sept. 1, 1803 we moved into our new house at Sandwich Birch Intervale. May God give us new hearts to serve him the remainder of our lives to Divine Ac- ceptance." It is interesting that he found in the woods near his new barn the blade of a knife lost where he and Hackett had killed a moose and camped twenty years before.
The diary now records the pioneering processes being re- peated on the new place. Bradbury attacked it with the energy of a young man clearing, burning, and planting for the first time. He planted 283 apple seeds; 20 "lemon walnut trees" (would this be butternut?); 2 plum trees, "nie 5 pks seed corn," 14 bushels potatoes, beans, flaxseed, rye, wheat, and oats. Oats and "400 of hay, paid $7.00 per ton" was for the horses traveling to Durham, and "borrowed 12 qts. of rum" meant hospitality. This borrowing Bradbury might not like us to pass on, unless we make clear that borrowing was in good repute in barter times.
John Tasker the indentured servant must have learned the pioneering craft in full from his master before he settled four years later, when freed, on his own acres up on a spur of Whiteface. A bondservant of the period was by law not too badly off. He signed a paper detailing all duties toward the master, but the master promised equally to send him to school and upon completion of his term of service to give him a suit of clothes and a yoke of oxen. Similarly, indentured girls were taught the "arts, trade and mystery of household man- agement," and when of an age to marry must be given an outfit and a cow. One of Bradbury's boys ran away and was
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about to take ship, but Bradbury "set the law on him" and he was returned. One could be kind, but to be just was an even greater virtue.
The lovely Ann Elizabeth was sixteen years Bradbury's junior, and outlived him by twenty-nine. Her wedding ring remains a family possession, inscribed around the inside "This and the giver are thine forever." After his death a legal agree- ment was drawn up between the widow and her son Nathaniel on the one side and her son Mark Freeman the preacher on the other, to divide equally the produce of the farm and a part of the costs carefully stipulated, Mark to get all the work done for both their interests. As his brother Nathaniel died a few years later, he may have been in poor health before, and therefore willingly supported by Mark along with his mother. Ann occupied the Jewell house till her death, and Mark after her saw his one-hundredth birthday there.
Mark Jewell's wife was "Aunt Dolly" affectionately known to all, and her son the Perry Jewell (Erastus Perry), last of the name to occupy the Jewell house. Perry was a good lawyer practising in Laconia and made the old farm his sum- mer home. It was he who secured the Post Office for Kate Sleeper. His old family desk (Bradbury's) was bought in by Arthur Walden at the auction of his effects when all Jewell buildings were being sold to Mr. and Mrs. Elliott Fisher for conversion to an inn, and has finally come to rest in the Tam- worth Historical collection. In the same museum are also six homemade black-painted chairs from the Jewell house, used in the interval by Seven Hearths.
Contemporary and intermarried with the Jewells were the Curriers whose farms were all in the same outer colony at the end of the road close under Passaconaway Mountain. The progenitor of these Curriers was a remarkable retired sea captain of the famous Crowninshield Brothers' clipper ships out of Salem, Mass., who found his way in retirement to settle in Sandwich. His pitch was first on the side of White- face on what was the earliest road between Birch Intervale
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and Whiteface Intervale, "laid out" in 1825 and now surviv- ing only as the McCrillis Trail, so named because leading to the McCrillis farm (but not to be confused with the McCrillis Trail up Whiteface from Whiteface Intervale). Captain John Currier's was one of several farmsteads along high pastures on this short cut across the hill. Such high sidehill farms had the great advantage of air drainage, not recognized for another 125 years. David Currier's was near his father; John Tasker's was there, too; Freeman Bickford's and Daniel Moulton's were others. Their cellar holes, hearthstones, and granite door- steps are still there, lost in dense growth, and unconquerable Lancaster roses, those red ones from the Wars of the Roses brought over from England by first settlers and still clinging among rocks, up to recent years acting as guides to the spots.
The White Hills, by Cornelius Weygandt, devotes a page or two to the old pogonia swamp up on that road, the little pink orchids in their hundreds drenching the air with fragrance while the bog sank the walker to his shoe tops. "This land was cleared and settled and abandoned all in less than a hun- dred years. Then it was mountain pasture for a generation Now it is almost grown up to woods again [quite]. ... Lights winked out once of nights ... that were seen as far off as Fellows Hill" and were used as night signals to call the Birch Intervale relatives, as they used the trumpet by day. Captain John moved away from there, however, perhaps after the great forest fire, to build again, what is now the oldest part of the former George Weed summer home on top of Maple Ridge.
This first Currier was a man of might, magisterial in looks and port, in the tradition of the old clipper ship dicta- tors. Several stories are revealing, but one will glimpse him. He stopped the last public whipping-at-the-post in Sandwich. The sentenced man had been tied to a pear tree and the crowd was gathered, gloating according to custom. Currier heard the victim yelling and appeared on the scene. "Stop that!" he shouted. "Untie that man! And you"-to the crowd-
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"go home! There will be no more public whippings in Sand- wich from this day." The crowd knew he had no right by law to stop the show and were refusing to go. "Come on!" he raged. "We'll settle this right here and now." And they dispersed.
The feat of his bringing an elephant from Bengal, the first ever seen in America, and exhibiting it about the country before selling it for a large profit is firmly embedded in the folklore. In the Essex Museum in Salem is much corrobora- tion of this episode. Today one hardly believes in a period of time when no one had seen an elephant, so the achievement does not accelerate the pulse as it might have earlier.
Of Captain Currier's eight children it was Benjamin who married Ruhamah Jewell, daughter of Bradbury and Ann. The house of the new couple was later a part of Ferncroft Inn, as Uncle John Jewell's became its laundry. It was this Cur- rier house where one bed was in Albany and one in Sand- wich. "The line ran plunk through the bedroom." The three children born there were Frank, Julia, and Hiram, with- in sight of present time. Hiram built a house near his father's, known in Ferncroft history as the Currier Cottage, partially burned and rebuilt.
Hi Currier was the character who left an unforgettable imprint on all early Wonalancet tradition. "His worst enemy would accept his weighing of a load of hay without question." His peaceable manner and shrewd wisdom, with the twinkle in the eye behind the white beard, are a part of history, as is the two-wheeled cart with ox team always beside him. The two-wheeled cart antedated any four-wheeled wagon. Though his farm was a mile away north, Hi would appear at any crisis, ready and able to take over. His favorite beginning was "Now then, there's a good deal to most things," and his calming influence on Arthur Walden when inclined to be ram- bunctious is never left untold. When for instance Arthur had horsewhipped a hired man for speaking rudely to his wife, it was Hi Currier who advised him to go to the nearest justice
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of the peace, who was Alonzo McCrillis at Whiteface, and swear out a warrant for his own arrest, which Arthur did. When land was to be found for a meetinghouse in 1880, it had been Hi, with Benjamin Currier his father and Daniel Tilton, who gave it. In 1890 they again gave labor and lum- ber when Miss Sleeper came and wanted the little chapel restored. Hill & Waddell of the sawmill up the valley contrib- uted all the sawing for this at their mill, and the mill crews their time for Miss Sleeper's request. Charles Tilton, Elbridge's son, recalls that at thirteen he himself contributed work hours like the grownups in the intervale; it was his father who later gave the organ as a memorial to his wife. Charles, lately asked if he remembered any amusing anecdotes, replied, "You know we were very respectable then."
Miss Sleeper wanted many things, some more unusual than a meetinghouse. She wanted hummocky roads smoothed out, dunghills moved out of sight, and front yards cleaned up. She even wanted paths through the woods and along the brook, with the brush cleared away underfoot, so that her guests could muse and rhapsodize as they wandered. Even these peculiar ideas were met. She was denied nothing she asked and the results pleased all.
The land given for the Chapel seems to have been called the schoolhouse lot; the first school is spoken of as "down by the river" but an old resident recalls it as east of the chapel. In any case the chapel grove still is a charming spot, between road and river which there brawls along at its shady best. The children at recess could have paddled and got agreeably wet. It is probable that Dr. Treadwell Walden's house was the first school, as Sally Jewell Brown who lived there (husband Gor- don Brown, son of Caleb) was a schoolteacher in her own house, and we know that this "Red House" was built as Caleb's first home and moved by Dr. Walden to its later site from across the river. Bradbury Jewell's journal throws a certain light:
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Jan. 9, 1809. School began at Caleb Brown's. Timothy Woodman, master. At a district meeting they voted that I might send as many of my children as I could for 3/ each a month to be paid in corn and rye in Jan. 1810, and also they voted for me to keep an account of what I did send, and at close of school, for me to settle with Caleb Brown for the same and give him my security. ...
School ended the eighteenth of March, and he had sent four children a total of twenty-one days. Pretty cold no doubt, and a mile's walk for small children a good deal. That road up to Ferncroft (formerly called the Currier Road) can be heavily drifted over in midwinter. The tuition charge was probably because Bradbury's house was over the line in Sand- wich.
School records of Birch Intervale are scarce but by 1838 there was a separate schoolhouse perhaps half-way up the Currier Road, which had already gone to ruin, as witness Eliza Bunker:
Excerpt from School Record (1838)
My name is Eliza Bunker. I am 151/4 years old and teach at Birch Intervale School. I board at Mrs. Erle's. It is nice and near the school house. I am paid $11/4 per week and this year taught only one term of 71/2 weeks.
I had no trouble except with one older boy who was 20 and had not attended school before.
About the school house, I wish to say the roof is all gone in one corner. You can see outside. The windows are all broken but we put paper over them. The floor is gone right under the bad roof. The fire place does not heat except in front of it. The wood was very wet at times as there is no wood shed. There are no conveniences for boys or girls. It is very cold at times. The school was dismissed three days. Miles Brown brought the water from his house. It would freeze in the bucket although it was near the fire place. There is no teachers desk or chair. No blackboard or erazer. The books were not enough for all and most were tore. The pupils were 17 with an attendance of 12. The big boys took
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my bell so I could not call them in. There were only 9 had slates. The boys made a loud noyse by scratching on the slates with pencils.
My uncle brought me here in his slay. I do not care to come back.
Eliza Bunker
Sweetser's Guide to the White Mountains first published in 1876 was the Baedeker carried by the first thousands who came by stagecoach into the north country in the seventies and eighties. Such a sightseeing trip in these areas meant a displacement almost equivalent to traveling around the world today. "Thousands on thousands of visitors bring their wealth hither and scatter it freely all along the fascinating pilgrim- ages" exulted the History of Carroll County in 1889, not anticipating the bottles and cartons that would one day be scattered just as freely. By 1892 the pilgrims had occasioned no less than a twelfth edition of Sweetser, and in the newest one a short paragraph in fine print is headed Birch Intervale:
61/2 M. from Tamworth Village, is a glen [had he seen it?] inhabited by intelligent Yankee farmers, with chapel, li- brary, improvement society, etc. Here is Miss Sleeper's Wonalancet Farm ($10-12 a week), a capital summer board- ing-house, with its 650 acres of meadows and ravines, forests and brooks, and the beautiful Wonalancet Falls. The farm- house dates from 1814, and its old-time quaintness has been preserved during the recent large additions in the interest of modern luxury.
The boardinghouse had been opened only the year be- fore; that it had already gained Mr. Sweetser's approval even in fine print, speaks strongly for it. The improvement society is a question mark-Wonalancet Outdoor Club was not yet founded; and though the modern luxury was distinctly rela- tive, the library and chapel were Miss Sleeper's very sign- manual.
The "beautiful Falls," the first object of pilgrimage to all boarders making their acquaintance with Nature's wonders,
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have long since disappeared under the power developments. An article in a Granite Monthly of 1914 by the Tamworth writer Mabel H. Kingsbury marvels at the three cascades that total a drop of over forty feet (eighty feet, says the early Guide to Wonalancet) with "a wonderful formation of bould- ers where the river disappears entirely." The charming Brook Path to this point was the most beaten of all trails. Even the lame, the halt, and the dowagers knew it well. Indeed old- timers can only recall with nostalgia its dark brook waters scurrying around rocks under overarching woods. While Miss Kingsbury calls attention to the fact that most of the summer residents by then had a garage, and automobiles were found in the barns of most farmers, she wished it known that not rock- ing-chairs or hammocks held the visitors, but to "Wonalancet devotees blazed trails, logging roads, new paths, mountain climbs, camping out, half-day walks, all-day climbs-outdoor life with a viewpoint and one worth while" were the magnet. The "out" in "camping out" dates the remarks.
Recreation regarded as a business was a startling new conception. But it could capitalize on the same mountains and streams that had furnished the mill business. Maintaining scenic beauty for the purposes of rest and vacation was the idea put into the minds of bearded farmers by the young woman who called them together, and standing up in front of them began her talk with the words, "We farmers." The beards shook with laughter, but her proposals carried. The leghorn hat above the humorous blue eyes is featured in all early reminiscences: the leghorn hat driving a four-horse team to the station to bring up guests, the leghorn hat out on the fields driving the hay rake, with the gentleman boarders streaming out to pitch hay.
Farmers had cleared up and over the top of what is now Mount Katherine (named for the potent figure we know), the favorite walk for the sunset view; cattle grazing up there were plainly seen from the valley. Nor did then anything interfere with a straight view up to the Curriers' houses from
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the back door of Wonalancet Farm. Our friend Sweetser gives 1820 as the date of the avalanche that scarred the south face of Whiteface. Yet it seems it was not this avalanche that gave the mountain its name, for Whiteface it was called in a Sandwich road return dated May 24, 1781, as cited in the Sandwich Historical Bulletin, 13th Excursion. People ask if Chocorua's cone was always bare. Sweetser in his period speaks of the "destruction of the forests on Chocorua's peak" as if this were a matter of history. The Carroll County history likes to merge poetic rapture with fact, and it had best not be taken as an affidavit that "Some time the lightnings that have played round its brow [Chocorua's] have blasted its forest trees, or fires kindled by human hands have gnawed like 'eternal hunger' on its sides." Yet modern naturalists who are familiar with every yard of Chocorua's summit have re- ported charred wood lying deep in rock crevices, seeming to verify the fire theory.
Forest fires must always have been the same enemy that they still are, and only of recent date are good fire-fighting equipment and techniques. Desperation is the only reinforce- ment sure to have been always present. Bradbury Jewell back in 1816 again furnishes a few grains of testimony. "Oct. 9, 1816. We finished fighting fires and I Bradbury Jewell have fit 17 days and nights. I missed one day and my family fit the most of the time night and day." Bradbury was a man of few words, but anyone who has lived through these fires knows what seventeen days and nights are. And they had one man where now would be a hundred, and no lookout stations, no telephones, no walkie-talkies, no pack pumps, no bull- dozers, no helicopters. "I was taken very sick when fighting fires and had a bad cough until the 18th of October." But, taken very sick, he was back on the job after one day. The cough would have been from the smoke. "The fires were on the Tasker farm," (John, the ex-indentured, losing his timber so soon after getting his own place!) "and from Smith's at the mountain round between Hubbard's and mine to Peter's
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swamp." It seems possible that the road across the intervale toward Sandwich used to be known as The Swamp. If it was "Peter's," this indicates that the fire extended from Birch Intervale over the lower slopes of Whiteface as far as White- face Intervale, as it "burnt the Widow McCrillis 2 barns and other buildings in Sandwich and Tamworth." No other recorded fire before or since has been so close to Tamworth or so extensive, save perhaps one in the Paugus Valley in the early years of this century which threatened to come over the ridge into Wonalancet and alarmed the whole region. It is pleasant to know that in 1954 New Hampshire led the entire country in forest fire control records; in 1955 it led the North- eastern States.
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